Collection reveals a Freudian mind

Freud's Sphinx antiquity, a Greek terracotta from the fourth or
fifth century BC. The Sphinx holds a central place in Freud's
psychoanalysis.Photo: Supplied

Janine Burke recalls how she fell in love with the great
psychoanalyst's extraordinary collection.

IT WAS 2003, AND ERICA Davies, the flamboyant director of the
Freud Museum London, was introducing me to the staff. Alex Bento,
who has been the museum's caretaker for many years, smiled broadly.
"I remember you," he said. I'd visited the museum for the first
time the year before when I'd fallen in love with Freud's art
collection and decided to write a book about it. "You couldn't
remember me," I protested. "Hundreds of people have been through
here since then." He nodded. "You are the woman who could not
leave."

On a sultry, summer afternoon, I caught the tube to Hampstead to
visit the Freud Museum. I knew Freud had a collection of
antiquities but I had no idea of its quality or scope. My knowledge
of Freud was slight. I had been impressed by The Interpretation
of Dreams but I knew nothing about the man's life, who he was,
what made him tick. I was in England to research a biography of
arts patron Sunday Reed, exploring the lavish, romantic gardens,
such as Vita Sackville-West's at Sissinghurst in Kent, that
influenced the style of garden Sunday and John Reed created at
Heide.

I got lost on the way to the museum, had to backtrack and change
trains, and I wondered if it was a Freudian slip. Did I really want
to visit Freud's home? Was there some form of internal resistance
going on? Emerging from the station at Finchley Road, a roaring,
brutally ugly thoroughfare, I spotted a small sign indicating the
route to the museum. I was rather disappointed, having imagined
Hampstead festooned with posters of Freud, the stern-faced,
white-bearded, implacable father of the sexual revolution.

Freud had arrived in London in 1938, when the Nazi invasion of
Vienna had forced him to flee. It was a terrible journey. Freud was
83 and suffering from cancer of the upper palate. He'd had to
abandon his home of 40 years at Berggasse 19, now the Freud Museum,
Vienna. There was also the chance that his collection of
antiquities may not arrive, even though Freud had won clearance for
it from the Nazi authorities.

"The gangsters are unpredictable," Freud observed. After buying
a house at 20 Maresfield Gardens, he settled in with Martha, his
wife, Minna Bernays, his sister-in-law and Anna, his youngest
daughter, a pioneering psychoanalyst of children. In August 1938,
to Freud's great relief, the antiquities were delivered.
Miraculously, nothing was missing or broken.

Maresfield Gardens is a pleasant, ordinary, middle-class street,
reminiscent of Balwyn or Sydney's North Shore. Freud's home is big
and comfortable, its status so discreetly advertised it is easy to
miss. After paying the admission fee, I wandered into Freud's
study, where I stopped, dazzled and enchanted. In the
fusty-smelling room, the daylight excluded by velvet drapes, I was
surrounded by a vast array of small, exquisite, ancient objects
crowded on every surface - Neolithic tools, delicate Babylonian
seals, vivid Egyptian funerary portraits, superb Greek Hellenistic
statues, gods from every pantheon, images of the Sphinx, erotic
Roman charms, luxurious Persian carpets and finely carved Chinese
jade.

I don't know how long I was there. Time slipped away. Several
times I walked to the front door, then turned around and went back
to the study. It was like Luis Bunuel's film The Exterminating
Angel, where the characters try to leave a house but, on
reaching the threshold, feel inexplicably compelled to stay. My
mind was brimming with questions. How did Freud afford this? How
long did it take to amass? Why choose antiquities and not modern
art? Why wasn't the collection better known?

Alex Bento was on the door that day and we started chatting. I
was there for so long perhaps Bento thought I was casing the joint,
and he'd better check me out. The Freud Museum is not high-tech; it
is a house museum sustained by low but consistent funding derived
from American philanthropy and local arts money. The staff
valiantly maintain the place on a shoestring budget. Downstairs is
Freud's study, the dining room and the museum shop. Upstairs is
more memorabilia, much of it related to Anna Freud, and a rabbit
warren of offices. Anna lived in the house, and saw patients there,
until her death in 1982.

Back in Australia, I immersed myself in Sunday's biography but I
couldn't get Freud's collection out of my head. How extraordinary
it was. How sadly unrecognised. In 1989, an excellent catalogue had
been published by an American university where a selection of the
works was exhibited. It was out of print, and that was all there
was. Finally, I decided to ring Davies and introduce myself. When I
stammeringly explained that I'd like to write a book about the
collection, Erica's answer was forthright and breezy. "When are you
coming back?"

Though I'm no specialist, I love ancient art, especially
Egyptian. When I lived in Paris in the mid-1980s, I haunted the
Egyptian rooms at the Louvre until many of those splendid objects
seemed like old friends. I could happily live in the British Museum
and spend my days wandering through the Greek and Roman
galleries.

Ancient art is fundamental to an understanding of civilisation,
imagination, humanity itself. Without it, there is no context for
contemporary society or thought. It is the beginning and the
continuity of our ideas and identity, the fecund source against
which art and intellectual endeavour is constantly renewed and
measured. My spiritual beliefs underscore my appreciation of
classical and pre-classical art. Like those cultures, I regard
nature as sacred, gendered and sensate.

During the course of my research, Davies asked if I would
organise an exhibition of the antiquities for Australia. When she
left the museum, librarian Keith Davies (who is no relation)
followed up the suggestion. Endlessly helpful, Keith is relied upon
by many international scholars; it is he who responds to the
constant, myriad queries about Freud. After some investigation,
however, I discovered that the business of moving antiquities
around our troubled world is a costly exercise and, regretfully, I
told Keith we'd have to abandon the plan.

Max Delany is well known as one of Melbourne's brightest
curators. After working at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Delany took
the helm at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces. When Delany was
appointed director of Monash University Museum of Art in 2004, Age
art critic Ashley Crawford believed that it consolidated Delany's
reputation as "a man with his finger on the pulse."

Talking to Delany at an opening in 2005, I told him about my
research on Freud's collection. Like many members of the Australian
art community, Delany knew the museum. "You'll do a show, won't
you?" he asked. When I explained the difficulties, he mused, "I
think there's a way."

Delany's solution was canny and practical: a small, highly
selective exhibition of key works that would illustrate not only
the scope and appeal of the collection but Freud's interest in
archaeology and, importantly, how the antiquities relate to his
pioneering theories about the unconscious, sexuality and
civilisation.

Both Delany and I felt that Edmund Engelman's evocative
photographs of Freud's study, taken just before he quit Vienna,
should be part of the exhibition, as well as the home movies,
narrated by Anna Freud, that show Freud relaxing with his family.
Raising money for the venture was a challenge. When University of
Sydney's Nicholson Museum, which has a fine antiquities collection,
enthusiastically expressed interest in co-hosting the show, the
possibility of bringing Freud's works to Australia became a
reality.

Freud's primary interest was in statues from the Mediterranean
and Middle East. The oldest work in the exhibition is Female
Figure (Ishtar) (c.2000-1750BC) from the Orontes Valley in
Syria. Freud used archaeology as the driving metaphor of
psychoanalysis.

"The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist, must uncover layer
after layer of the patient's psyche, before coming to the deepest,
most valuable treasures." Ishtar was the region's super-goddess, in
charge of love, storms, fertility and war. Sacred prostitution was
part of her worship. This figure was an offering to the goddess at
one of her temples. As Freud believed that the first three years of
life determine an individual's destiny, it is not surprising that
he was drawn to collecting objects from the childhood of
civilisation.

The bulk of Freud's collection is Egyptian. Freud bought
Isis suckling the infant Horus in 1935. It is a major work
and Freud gave it an honoured place on his desk. The story of how
Freud acquired Isis offers a good example of how undervalued
antiquities were in his lifetime and how he managed to amass such a
large collection on a limited budget. Robert Lustig, Freud's
favourite Viennese antiquities dealer, spotted Isis in a junk shop
in the countryside. When he asked the price, the shop owner put the
statue on the scale to weigh it, and Lustig bought it for the price
of the metal.

Freud made the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx central to
psychoanalysis. "A single idea of general value dawned on me. I
have found, in my own case too (the phenomenon of) being in love
with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a
universal event in early childhood." Freud believed this powerful
instinctual drive explained the development of sexual identity in
both men and women.

Sphinx is a superb Greek terracotta from late-fifth,
early-fourth-century BC. In Egyptian art, the Sphinx was a
protective, benevolent male figure who represented the pharaoh. In
Greek art, the Sphinx was female, and associated with death and
funerary monuments. In Sophocles' play, Oedipus Rex, she is the
destructive trickster whom Oedipus must outsmart to save the city
of Thebes, and his own life. Sphinx wears the polos, or headdress
of the goddess. She is a powerful, magical, hybrid being, part
woman, part eagle, part lion.

Freud's collection is becoming better known, as its journey to
the antipodes proves. Freud Museum staff, including director
Michael Molnar and Keith Davies, will accompany the show. What has
prevented the appreciation of Freud the art collector? Freud's
biographers have emphasised the development of psychoanalysis, with
its feuds, reversals and breakthroughs, and it has meant that the
collection, if appraised at all, is viewed solely as an adjunct to
Freud's theories.

Freud did not help matters. In a productive writing life, he
produced no major text on the collection, though references to it
abound throughout his publications. Nor did psychoanalysis find the
fruitful reception in England that it did in America. In
museum-rich London, many seem unaware of the Freud Museum's
existence. But Freud, who conceived of psychoanalysis as an
international enterprise, would be pleased, I think, that his
antiquities have once again travelled across time and space to
display what he cherished - the allure and inspiration of the pagan
past.

Dr Janine Burke is author of The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud's
Art Collection, published by Knopf.

Sigmund Freud's Collection: An Archaeology of the Mind, opens
at the Monash University Museum of Art on Wednesday and runs until
November 17. It will show at the Nicholson Museum, University of
Sydney from January 2 until March 30, 2008.